Google Drive Slashes Prices, $1.99 a Month for 100GB, $9.99 for 1TB

It appears that Google wants their cloud storage to be more relevant than ever before. Sure, they expanded the amount of free cloud storage for users, but it was only 15 GB. The truth is that most of their cloud storage offerings simply weren’t very good, their pricing wasn’t that great, and their apps weren’t that great at using it. However, over the past year or so they’ve improved a lot of Google Apps’ Drive integration and have made Google Drive more relevant. So, with those changes also had to come a change in Google Drive’s pricing structure to be more attractive than it had been in the past when compared to OneDrive and Dropbox. So, today, they announced new pricing.

As you can see above, I personally have used up about half of my available free storage, but I’m clearly in danger of going over my free 15 GB of storage. Their current pricing plans are a change from the past where Google used to charge people for 10 to 20 GB of Gmail storage for $20 or so a year. However, Google is clearly looking to become a serious cloud storage provider and they want more users paying for their Google Drive storage in order to enable a larger install base. Not to mention, they know that even though people are paying for 100 GB or 1 TB they will never actually use all of it. This will likely go for their even bigger plans that span beyond 1 TB.

While I’m not entirely sure who would need 30 TB of storage the best deals are without a doubt the 1 TB plan because you are effectively paying $1 per 100 GB while you pay $2 per 100 GB with the $1.99 a month plan. The other plans merely scale that deal to whatever the amount of terabytes is. So, 30 x the 1TB plan should cost you $300 and it does, which explains why the 30 TB plan costs $300 a month. While we haven’t exactly tested Google’s Drive cloud performance, it may become an interesting thing to check on and see which cloud service is faster, cheaper, etc. To me, anything over 100 GB sounds like an off-site backup storage solution, because I just don’t see many people needing 30 TB of cloud storage, for anything, especially Google Drive.